Love and Will Book

Not my favorite existential psychologist, but Rollo May includes some stellar quotes in Love and Will about sex, ardor, and what it means to truly care about someone or something. I felt that the first two-thirds of the book drifted off into history (e.g. the Victorian era and its implications, Plato's philosophy) and the foundations of psychology (e.g. the Daimonic, lots and lots of Freud) without offering new or relevant ideas. While May does a great job of discussing the strengths and weaknesses of Freud's contributions to psychology, he did not give many applicable insights into contemporary culture or human behavior in general, which disappointed me because of the prevalence of concepts such as love and will.

However, the last third of this book provides many striking and memorable quotes about the intersectionalities of love and will. While I recommend reading more of Yalom's or Rogers' writing, May still provides valuable commentary within an existential lens. I will end this review with some of his most stellar passages:

"Love and will are both forms of communion of consciousness. Both are also affects - ways of affecting others and our world. This play on words is not accidental: for affect, meaning affection or emotion, is the same word as that for affecting change. An affect or affection is also the way of making, doing, forming something. Both love and will are ways of creating consciousness in others. To be sure, each may be abused: love may be used as a way of clinging, and will as a way of manipulating others in order to enforce a compliance. But the abuse of an affect should not be the basis for its definition. The lack of both love and will ends up in separation, putting a distance between us and the other person; and in the long run, this leads to apathy."

"But eros cannot live without philia, brotherly love and friendship. The tension of continuous attraction and continuous passion would be unbearable if it lasted forever. Philia is the relaxation in the presence of the beloved which accepts the other's being as being; it is simply liking to be with the other, liking to rest with the other, liking the rhythm of the walk, the voice, the whole being of the other. Philia does not require that we do anything for the beloved except accept him, be with him and enjoy him. It is friendship in the simplest, most direct terms.

This is why Paul Tillich makes so much of acceptance, and the ability - curious loss for modern man that this will sound strange - to accept acceptance. We are the independent men who, often taking our powers too seriously, continuously act and react, unaware that much of value in life comes only if we don't press, comes in quietly when it is not pushed or required, comes not from a drive from behind or an attraction from in front, but emerges silently from simply being together."

"We love and will the world as an immediate, spontaneous totality. We will the world, create it by our decision, our fiat, our choice; and we love it, give it affect, energy, power to love and change us as we mold and change it. This is what it meanas to be fully related to one's world. I do not imply that the world does not exist before we love or will it one can answer that question only on the basis of his assumptions, and, being a mid-westerner with inbred realism, I would assume that it does exist. But it has no reality, no relation to me, as I have no effect upon it; I move as in a dream, vaguely and without viable contact.

For in every act of love and will - and in the long run they are both present in every genuine act - we mold ourselves and our world simultaneously. This is what it means to embrace the future."